Not a Deal: Should I Use DaVinci Resolve or Premiere Pro?

[Leslie Fuller]

Hi Reid, 

I can’t say that Vegas Pro doesn’t crash for me very occasionally, more often than not during loading.  

I have to say that Vegas has not been the sole program I would use for video editing for many years, and most of the “heavy lifting” is always done on another program on a Mac. Both the Mac and PC laptop I use have 8gb ram, and if you have 64gb, I can’t imagine why Vegas would have a problem!

The infrastructure around Premiere Pro is second to none, and if you’re happy with the ongoing cost, then stick with it. 

[Jim Roseberry]

Hi Reid,

What version of Vegas Pro are you currently using?

 

Here's my experience/opinion on Vegas Pro, DaVinci Resolve, and Premier Pro:

 

I find Vegas Pro the most "DAW like"... so for the very basics, it's easy for a typical DAW user to get up-and-running.

That being said, for more advanced functions/processing (Chroma keying, etc), I find Vegas (at least previous versions) a bit dated/clunky.

Vegas often crashes due to some simple issue.  I remember v13 crashing upon startup.  Simple fix... but those types of things can be annoying.

 

DaVinci Resolve offers so many amazing features, it's almost overwhelming.

Basic cuts/splices/transitions are actually very easy.  Not too drastically different from Vegas Pro.

It's when you're getting into Video EFX (nodes) that it can get pretty deep (need to watch tutorials, etc).

By itself (no 3rd-party plugins), DaVinci Resolve is probably the single most complete Editing/processing package.

Makes good use of multi-core CPUs.

High-end GPU is almost a necessity.  The recommended RTX-3070 with 8GB RAM has been going for almost $800.

With the previous version of DaVinci Resolve; I encountered issues where more complex EDLs (sessions) resulted in the timeline getting scrambled.

After losing hours of work, I decided to keep my use of DaVinci Resolve to more basic cut/splice/transition duties (no special effects, etc).

 

Premier Pro is IME the least intuitive for those coming from a DAW background.

As was mentioned, the integration with After Effects, PhotoShop, Illustrator, etc is hard to beat.

IME, The Adobe products are not the most CPU efficient, the most full-featured, or the easiest to use.

That said, I find for the time spent using them... I'm productive.

I find the Adobe products generally pretty stable.

 

Ironically, I just upgraded to Vegas Post Suite.

Haven't (yet) done any real work with it.

 

I'd recommend having several video editing applications (suites) in the toolbox.

Video production is such a wide open and rapidly evolving field, you're going to encounter roadblocks.

Having numerous options let you work-around those problems.

 

[Reid Rosefelt]

21 minutes ago, Jim Roseberry said:

Hi Reid,

What version of Vegas Pro are you currently using?

I'd recommend having several video editing applications (suites) in the toolbox.

Video production is such a wide open and rapidly evolving field, you're going to encounter roadblocks.

Having numerous options let you work-around those problems.

 

I'm on Vegas Pro 16.

You know one of my computers very well, because you built it! 

I'm currently running Vegas Pro on that computer and another very powerful one (my previous music/video computer) rs now with the same exact problems.  I've had the same problems with six computers over the years, including only very powerful gaming laptop. 

My YouTube videos are very heavy on visual FX.   So getting more plugins is a big deal to me.  I am always shopping for stuff, and when I find something I love, it is made for Premiere.  

It is impossible to make them using Vegas Pro.  So I do very brief chapters at a time.  Sometimes a chapter is only one clip and the editing mainly involves finding the best part and adding some alpha to it.   Working this way, it crashes very little and I get work done.

But eventually I have to bring everything together. My latest video is a half hour.  At this point it crashes very quickly.  As I put in a new chapter I try to save immediately before it crashes and then I close it.  Sometimes it crashes within ten seconds. 

One thing I've learned from many posts about how to keep Vegas from crashing is that you should never drag anything onto the timeline.,  So what I have to do is output each chapter into a final file and then import that file into my full file.  Losing quality of course.

So all Vegas has to do is hold a number of finished video files with associated audio together in a line.  I don't think this is a lot to ask a video editor to do, but it can't do that.  Maybe it is simply not able to handle a very long video. 

My last video has horrible sound.  This had nothing to do with the recording, which was fine.  The default setting is that Vegas puts EQ, Compression, and Gate on each new audio track. There's probably an easy way to shut this off, but I have always handled it by remembering to turn it off.   But if you forget and a track gets double--processed (because I'm coping for Vegas crashing)  it can be disastrous.  This time I forgot and there was some double processing which made my voice sound flanged,all  thanks to Vegas.  I compounded this error by changing the names of the tracks, which made it impossible to get back to the source material without starting from zero and re-editing stuff that took days to do. So I just put it up and feel awful about it.  Weeks on a video and it sounds like crap thanks to Vegas.

I was coming up with some idea of how to stop this problem for the next video, but I'm done. 

I am sure there are some great Vegas features I use all the time that Premiere Pro won't have, but I'll just have to cope. 

If it will be possible to make one of my videos on a single timeline it would be like going to heaven. 

 

[Jim Roseberry]

I don't have a lot of free time to fully digest a deep video application.

I need to hit-the-ground running... and be productive in the short amount of the time available.

Though not perfect, I've found I'm most productive with Premier/After Effects.

I can't remember the last time Premier or After Effects crashed.

 

You're right, most of the good third-party effects are all available for Adobe. 

If you're doing Chroma Key (green-screen), Boris' Primatte Studio is amazing.

 

Wish Adobe would fully optimize After Effects for multi-core CPUs.

 

 

Edited February 26, 2021 by Jim Roseberry

[mettelus]

Another consideration I didn't notice is if you intend to use plugins. Different vendors cater to certain platforms, but most include PP simply because they are the standard. You should be able to find that readily on FX vendor sites, but PP has always been on the compatible list that I have seen.

[Matthew Sorrels]

2 hours ago, Jim Roseberry said:

Wish Adobe would fully optimize After Effects for multi-core CPUs.

This!  A thousand times this.  I've been using Render Garden sometimes on my local machine which does help a bit, but still not as good as AE could be.

[ZokZTM]

I use Resolve exclusively now for over 2 years... before that used Premiere Pro for about 10 years, before that Final Cut pro 7. Used After effects all the time, but got so fed up with Adobe, never fixing basic bugs and extremely slowly doing the updates for their video apps (After Effects, Premier Pro) and yet happily taking my money every month... wasn't happy with this kind of arrangement so switched to Resolve. 

Resolve is great as is the Premier Pro, I love Colour correction in Resolve very much and Fusion is getting very good, but it isn't yet close to the After Effects, for what I've been using it for. 

There's much more third party support for plugins, templates  etc. for Adobe platform.  MUCH more.

Premier Pro was drastically slower than Resolve on my system, (talking about the rendering stuff out 4k etc)

I'm o Mac (iMac Pro) and Resolve runs great. Main difference is for me... the most annoying part with Premiere pro was the final movies renders via Media Encoder, so many crashes, corrupted renders, and the only help was sometimes to render the TGA  image sequence, so when it crashed, you start from the crashed frame so to save the (re-render) time... frustrating stuff... but that could have changed in the past 2 years. For comparison, not one Resolve render in my time with the app has ever been corrupted or crashed.

I believe Resolve is growing fast as the complete edit - finalise solution and hopefully will get you there to the desired final product... But there are also many annoying bugs that go unfixed from one version to the other (Cubase Pro - type of scenario), so it isn't all honey.

Working with proxies in Resolve is really great and takes away the stress from the CPU-GPU processing.

... And if you happen to own the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera  (4k-6k) the BRAW is absolutely great and very light nicely optimised and runs fast in Resolve.

Just my two cents...

[Simeon Amburgey]

So here is the BANE of my Vegas Pro Workflow Killer.
I accidentally set some loop points as I was selecting the video clip on the timeline and tried clicking PLAY.

First sign that you are done!

White Screen Of Death!

 

Then you look in TASK MANAGER and it is always the FILE I?O surrogate (not visible) (32 bit) that seems to be the main culprit in this nightmare.

So it gets very frustrating as evident with Reid's experience.
If you do not constantly hit save, it is almost impossible to anticipate where this will happen. Also, even though Vegas does save recovery files in the background, there is not sure fire indication it is not several edits behind where you were.

So Reid, I really do feel your pain in this situation, and yet here I am hitting the same walls, maybe someone knows of a Vegas Pro recovery support group, but it is probably obvious that it is on a Davinci Resolve or Premier user forum.

We'll get there eventually. ;^)

 

[mettelus]

6 hours ago, Simeon Amburgey said:

If you do not constantly hit save

^^^^This is an issue with multiple media-editing programs, and usually linked to the Undo History, or more specifically how many revisions are maintained in the Undo History. That is something to check on each program that can be adjusted (I have noticed some default to 100+ actions). When working with massive files, the Undo History will chew up RAM quickly and begin writing to disk, so you can see things either slow dramatically or become not responsive for extended periods (some recover, others do not). Setting the Undo History to 25 or even 10 for many programs is definitely something to consider. "Saving often" seems to clear that RAM out for most programs (you can no longer "undo" after the save), which is why they run more smoothly. Saving prior to a CPU/RAM-intensive operation is also good practice for this same reason.

[Simeon Amburgey]

1 hour ago, mettelus said:

^^^^This is an issue with multiple media-editing programs, and usually linked to the Undo History, or more specifically how many revisions are maintained in the Undo History. That is something to check on each program that can be adjusted (I have noticed some default to 100+ actions). When working with massive files, the Undo History will chew up RAM quickly and begin writing to disk, so you can see things either slow dramatically or become not responsive for extended periods (some recover, others do not). Setting the Undo History to 25 or even 10 for many programs is definitely something to consider. "Saving often" seems to clear that RAM out for most programs (you can no longer "undo" after the save), which is why they run more smoothly. Saving prior to a CPU/RAM-intensive operation is also good practice for this same reason.

Thanks so much, I have never thought to check this particular angle before. I will definitely check it out and really appreciate the insight.

[Brian Walton]

Somewhat on topic Resolve 17 (non-beta is finally out).

It was in beta for what seemed like months.

[Bruno de Souza Lino]

Out of frustration of my current editing setup using REAPER (yes, it edits videos too. Since version 5), I decided to give Lightworks a try, since Resolve doesn't run on my machine and Premiere requires me selling my soul to Adobe and also doesn't run on my machine. I was suprised at how stable and performing it was, having some quirks but doing all the started video editing tasks I do with ease. That's what I'm using for now.

[Reid Rosefelt]

I am a few days in to Premiere.  One thing that really helped was installing the sideshow fx profiles.  That way I started out with all the keyboard shortcuts pre-mapped to buttons.  So if I want to do something, all I have to do is find the button.  And I've watched a ton of Premiere Pro tutorials on the Adobe site to learn the workflow.   I have a lot to learn. 

To me, this is so much better than Vegas or any other editing program I've used.  I feel exactly the way I did when I got Omnisphere.  Why the hell didn't I get this long ago?   I'm just getting started, but it is sooooo powerful. 

So far it hasn't crashed.  I'm sure it often will.   Cubase crashes. Photoshop crashes. It happens.  Vegas crashes too much for me.

And then there's the plugins.  It's like getting full Kontakt.  Once you have it you can go on the web and find all this amazing free transitions and effects  Better than things I paid big bucks to buy from NewBlue. (All my NewBlue plugins work though)  It's the same.  Everybody wants to give you freebies, so you will discover their companies and buy stuff.  I can't wait for Black Friday!   

There are plugin packages I have looked at for a long time. Now I'm going to get some of them. 

@cclarry    What are the rules here?  Do you want me to share deals and sales on Premiere Plugins?  ?

[InstrEd]

Share all you want, it is up to us to show restraint

[Dave Maffris]

On 2/26/2021 at 10:40 AM, Jim Roseberry said:

Hi Reid,

What version of Vegas Pro are you currently using?

 

Here's my experience/opinion on Vegas Pro, DaVinci Resolve, and Premier Pro:

 

I find Vegas Pro the most "DAW like"... so for the very basics, it's easy for a typical DAW user to get up-and-running.

That being said, for more advanced functions/processing (Chroma keying, etc), I find Vegas (at least previous versions) a bit dated/clunky.

Vegas often crashes due to some simple issue.  I remember v13 crashing upon startup.  Simple fix... but those types of things can be annoying.

 

DaVinci Resolve offers so many amazing features, it's almost overwhelming.

Basic cuts/splices/transitions are actually very easy.  Not too drastically different from Vegas Pro.

It's when you're getting into Video EFX (nodes) that it can get pretty deep (need to watch tutorials, etc).

By itself (no 3rd-party plugins), DaVinci Resolve is probably the single most complete Editing/processing package.

Makes good use of multi-core CPUs.

High-end GPU is almost a necessity.  The recommended RTX-3070 with 8GB RAM has been going for almost $800.

With the previous version of DaVinci Resolve; I encountered issues where more complex EDLs (sessions) resulted in the timeline getting scrambled.

After losing hours of work, I decided to keep my use of DaVinci Resolve to more basic cut/splice/transition duties (no special effects, etc).

 

Premier Pro is IME the least intuitive for those coming from a DAW background.

As was mentioned, the integration with After Effects, PhotoShop, Illustrator, etc is hard to beat.

IME, The Adobe products are not the most CPU efficient, the most full-featured, or the easiest to use.

That said, I find for the time spent using them... I'm productive.

I find the Adobe products generally pretty stable.

 

Ironically, I just upgraded to Vegas Post Suite.

Haven't (yet) done any real work with it.

 

I'd recommend having several video editing applications (suites) in the toolbox.

Video production is such a wide open and rapidly evolving field, you're going to encounter roadblocks.

Having numerous options let you work-around those problems.

 

Hey, Jim, I recently picked up the Geforce 3070 for $500.00, which I think is the standard price. It works well with Da Vinci. Agree that sometimes the program can be difficult to master. I also have issues with stuttering playback while editing, and I haven't been able to overcome it. But I'm not doing any more video right now for awhile do to other music projects on my plate.

 

[Jim Roseberry]

If you got a RTX-3070 for $500, (at this time) that is a fantastic price.

Microcenter has an MSI model right now (in stock) for just under $800.

 

[Max Arwood]

I have done tv spots and 1 hour broadcast shows editing in Vegas for 15+ years. The secret is not to upgrade till the next version comes out with the next version free.  Use 14 till the  15/16 upgrade comes out. Then use the 15 till 16/17 comes out lol! They have most of the bugs out when the next version of out. Sony had more stable versions. 

[Bruno de Souza Lino]

1 hour ago, Max Arwood said:

I have done tv spots and 1 hour broadcast shows editing in Vegas for 15+ years. The secret is not to upgrade till the next version comes out with the next version free.  Use 14 till the  15/16 upgrade comes out. Then use the 15 till 16/17 comes out lol! They have most of the bugs out when the next version of out. Sony had more stable versions. 

Sony had to have more stable versions because people know their brand name. MAGIX on the other hand...